~~ Mao Skull Display ~~
In 2026, our good boy of 14 years finally passed away. He was a dramatic little guy who loved chin scritches and eating house plants. We knew he was sick for a while. The vet initially said a few weeks, but we ended up getting a few months before we had to make the call. Miss the little guy.
My wife knew she wanted to preserve him in some way, and a skull mount made the most sense. It is surprisingly difficult to find a taxidermist who will work with pets, but eventually we found one who agreed to take him whenever he passed. A few weeks later he was back at home. I knew I didn't want something that looked like a hunting trophy and settled on a bell jar sort of thing.
Initially we just bought a jar, but I didn't like how the base looked. Instead I designed a new base for the jar that I 3D printed. The only two things I needed were a brass rod from the hardware store and the bell jar itself. The final assembly is four 3D printed parts: the base, a TPU insert for the ring the glass sits in, a little collar for the bottom of the brass rod, and a small cross-shaped cap for the other end. The TPU ring sits in a groove, the rod is glued into a hole in the base with the collar providing reinforcement, and the cap is glued onto the rod.
To mount the skull, I hot glued it to the cross-shaped cap. I wanted something reversible that wouldn't harm the skull if I needed to reverse it, so it's important to print the cross cap in a higher-temperature filament — I used PETG. I used wood PLA for the base and stained it afterwards.
The wood texture isn't mine. It comes from a clever trick someone else figured out, where you can apply a wood texture to any 3D printed part. It certainly doesn't pass for real wood in the hand, but from a few feet away it's pretty convincing when stained. After putting it together, I decided I wanted to add a name plate. I had one made and printed the final bracket out of wood PLA to hold it. I think it turned out pretty classy.
Any pet death is always sad, but at least I got a neat knickknack out of it. Now his little brother's only job is to not make me think about this again for AT LEAST a decade!